Alexander Key
Honey an’ Hoecake
A report to the nation on some unreconstructed Southern cooking which will make the driest Yankee mouth water
For any convictions I may have on the art of living, I can thank my grandfather and my great-uncle – a pair of unreconstructed rebels who, after the carpetbagger invasion, retreated to the wilds of Florida to carry on some semblance of a way of life that had been lost to them. They managed to carry on exceptionally well, and left me with the profound impression that not only was the old way of life the beat of all but that old-fashioned Southern cooking has no equal.
Morse Robert, as all of us called my grandfather, and Cap’n Joe were as opposite as the poles; the former was a soft-spoken scholar who, curiously, had been a hard-riding aide of Gen. Nathan [“Git thar the fustest”] Forrest; while Cap’n Joe was a great bellowing pirate of a man who had brawled his way all over the South. Yet they were in firm accord on the constitution of a well-set table, and both were eloquent devotees of corn bread and long sweetening.
From these two I early learned to regard short sweetening, or sugar, as a soulless innovation unfit for gourmets. But in long sweetening there was all the tangy richness of the land, and it was cither choice cane sirup or the rare golden honey of the swamps. They poured it in their coffee and even smothered their hominy with it, and they looked upon it as God’s gift to corn.
For corn itself they had the deep reverence of early Americans, and Cap’n Joe particularly was a connoisseur of everything made from it, whether it be hoecake or crackling bread or the contents of certain brown jugs one was apt to stumble over anywhere about his domain. And Cap’n Joe’s domain was like the table he set – ever a dream of peace and plenty.
On his plantation, from which the great coastal swamps stretched for seventy miles to the Gulf, he was as self-sufficient ns any man can be. Quail and turkey overran the place, big game stalked the shadows, and from the farther darkness came the mysterious tupelo honey. He raised special corn for meal and special cane for sirup, and no man ever smoked a spicier sausage or a richer ham – all of it peanut-fattened, of course. Pomegranates and figs grew with tropic abandon around his house, and the long lane was flanked with huge arbors whence came his scuppernong wine.
His house was of that homestead variety seemingly sired by a mansion and foaled by a cabin, with a dog run through the middle. I’ve seldom seen it when it was not overflowing, for Cap’n Joe loved company, and Thanksgiving feasts were his specialty.
When the great day came, Marse Robert and I – and a host of cousins and uncles and aunts – would make the horse-and-buggy pilgrimage that inevitably ended with Cap’n Joe roaring his greetings from the head of the lane: “It’s good to see ye all again! I bet ye can’t guess what we’re havin’!”
Almost any guess was right, for at the commonest Sunday dinner there was a bewildering choice of meats, cakes, fruits and puddings, and that wondrous Thanksgiving table, heaped with the year’s ripenings, was the sum of them all. And always enthroned at the head of the table, brown and savory, was an immense wild gobbler stuffed with nut dressing.
The preparation of such a feast occupied Cap’n Joe’s sons and daughters and old black Hannah for days in advance. A widower, his was the word and the law; he did none of the work, but he knew how everything should taste; so he was all over the place, bellowing orders, and drawing strength from his jugs to bedevil the cook, and being a confounded nuisance while he enjoyed himself thoroughly. But with the coming of the sacred moment when all of us had gathered at the table, he was suddenly very humble. Only a nonswearing gentleman could perform a certain function, looking at Marse Robert, he would say, “Will ye, please?” And eloquently Marse Robert would ask the blessing.
Those dinners were very heady culinary precedents, though I was far from suspecting the art that went into the making of even so simple a thing as one of Cap’n Joe’s hoecakes. Good cooking is traditional, and one should no more expect a fine hoecake in the North than a worthy apple pie in the Gulf States Hoecake, ashcake, journeycake, or johnnycake, corndodger and scratchback – they are all corn bread in its simplest form and as thoroughly American as corn itself. Early America thrived on it, won independence and carried our borders westward with it, for it can keep a man going like no other bread on earth. We should eat it with reverence – and yet today half of America has forgotten how to make it.
Good corn bread begins at the mill. And Southern preference is not for the big mill of commerce, but the little creaking McGuffey Reader water mill where small quantities of selected corn are ground slowly between stones. From such a place the meal comes forth soft and flaky, and with all the flavor of real Southern corn meal.
Fresh meal has a flavor of its own, and mill day has always been a day of adventure. You catch the South’s fattest bream in these mill ponds – big, flashing red-breasted fellows that are always cooked on the spot and eaten with hoe-cakes made from meal still warm from the stones. Every bream fisherman knows the recipe:
Using a cup or two of sifted meal, you merely moisten it with enough boiling water to form a stiff batter. Adding a little bacon or ham fat, you spoon it into a hot, well-greased skillet and press it into cakes a half inch thick. Crisp and brown and eaten hot, they are the very essence of the world’s richest grain.
Hannah-Marie Hoecake
Such were the journeycakes, or johnnycakes, of old, before they were mode with risings. The South calls them hoecakes because they were so often cooked on the large flat blade of a pioneer hoe. Molded into small pones that fit the palm of your hand, and baked in an oven, they become corndodgers or scratchbacks. But baked on a hot brick in a fireplace, the same recipe produces the ashcake. This demands a clean hearth and an oak fire.
After the fire has died down, you mold your hoecake mixture into thick pones, place them on a clear-swept place where the bricks are hot. and – you’ll find this hard to do at first – cover them with ashes topped with red coals. When they are baked, you just dust them off and slice away the outer crust, then butter t he inside and pity the poor devil without a fireplace.
Few cooks have equaled the corn-meal achievements of Cap’n Joe’s Hannah. As black as soot and as dire as the Congo, she would put up with Cap’n Joe’s busybody inspections until he got too much underfoot; then she’d turn on him like a witch.
“Dis heah’s mah kitchen? Go’n an’ let a po’ body cook!” And she cooked for him faithfully for fifty years, following the recipes used by her mother, who had also cooked in the same household. For Hannah, cold corn bread had only one use – to make turkey dressing. There is nothing quite like it.
After lightly browning a cup of chopped onions in butter, you pour in a cup of turkey stock and mix it with four cups of crumbled corn bread and a few crumbled biscuits. Into this stir two eggs, a cup of chopped pecans, salt and pepper and a generous dusting of sage, and then brown it in the oven. Hot water should be added when using it as a stuffing.
Hannah’s special hoecakes were works of art. Dappled gold and brown, they were as thick as your thumb and as large as a plate, and the grand aroma of them filled the room.
For a long time after leaving the South, I thought Hannah’s secret of making them was lost with the past. Then one day I returned, acquired a house with the Gulf on one side and Cap’n Joe’s swamps on the other, and, after some culinary tribulations, also acquired one Marie, from whom I speedily learned that no worthy recipe ever dies in the tidewater country.
An upriver Geechee whose rapid patois is at times confounding, Marie made no pretense of being a kitchen marvel. But at the mention of hoecake the said, “Yassuh, Ah reckons Ah mebbe could.” And straightway that noon a great brown and golden object appeared on the table. It had an unmistakable aroma. And ready beside it was a pitcher of swamp honey.
It vanished before she could bring in the second. “Marie,” I asked solemnly, “how the devil did you make that thing? ”
“Jes throwed hit together lak mah gran’mamma done teached me how. Whuffo you ask? Ain’t it good?”
“It’s perfect! Will you write down what you put into it?”
So here is the recipe for the great Hannah-Marie hoecake, us set forth by the latter:
1 1/2 cp mele
1/2 cp flowr
1 tesepson salt
2 teas. B. P.
pinch sodo
1 1/2 cp sowre milck
3 tablspson cosking oil
1 eg
Decoded, the “cosking oil,” or cooking oil, is really melted bacon or ham fat. The sour milk is preferably buttermilk, and the amount of “flowr” varies slightly with the quality of the “mele” – a coarse meal requiring a bit more flour than a meal of finer grind Marie sifts the dry ingredients together, stirs in the milk, egg and fat, and after giving it a terrific beating for several minutes, spoons half the mixture into a large iron skillet, well greased and piping hot.
* * *
Cap’n Joe regarded long Bweetening and whisky from the same point of view. There was, he averred, no bad whisky – though some was a heap better’n others. Similarly, as an accessory to corn cakes, sorghum and blackstrap were each passable, cane sirup was excellent, but tupelo honey transcended everything.
I didn’t solve the mystery of tupelo until after returning to the Gulf. It comes from the bloom of a weird subtropical tree that grows only in certain tidewater swamps. Most of this strange honey originates in that vast area of flooded darkness that lies between the Gulf marshes and Cap’n Joe’s back door. At hidden apiaries perched on stilts in the jungle, the lonely beekeepers battle high water, malaria and marauding bears – devilishly smart bears who so love the tupelo flavor that they have learned to walk upright and carry the hives long distances between their fore-paws.
Your first taste of it is like your first bowl of burgoo – either you want no more of it or you fully agree with the bears. Clear and heavy and golden, it will never turn to sugar or lose its flavor. For the flavor, you’d have to know what the swamps are like in spring, when they send forth such a quantity of perfume that fishermen can smell the sweetness miles at sea. Tupelo honey tastes like the swamp smell.
I’ll never know what went into one of Cap’n Joe’s burgoos. A burgoo is a fabulous creation that reached its peak along with the bowler hat and the diamond stud; you dished it out at country weddings, political rallies or any other big get-together. Many call it Brunswick stew, though this latter is often a medley of rice, hens and squirrels, and not a burgoo at all.
No two cooks make real burgoo the same way, and no one cook has ever made it the same way twice – unless his name is J. T. Looney, of Lexington. This Kentucky gentleman’s oft-quoted recipe calls for 600 pounds of lean soup meat, 200 fat hens, 2000 pounds of diced potatoes, and other ingredients in like quantity, all of which add up to Rome 1200 gallons. Other burgoo makers specified wild meat – a pair of plump bucks, five wild turkeys, fifty squirrels and a bag or two of quail.
Much more reasonable is Mississippi’s James Street, whose Southern tales are always well spiced with the flavor of good food. A burgoo, says Mr. Street, is obviously a man’s dish. Women are too practical to make it. They measure things. A good burgoo maker works by instinct.
Mississippi Burgoo
Originally, he says, burgoo was an oatmeal porridge of Scotland. When Scots became American pioneers, they began adding livings to the water and oatmeal. Game at first, and anything else that was handy. Finally the oatmeal was forgotten, and burgoo became a kind of hodgepodge stew evolved from the hunter’s bag. The Street recipe calls for a few squirrels and quail, a rabbit and a hunk of venison, and a chicken thrown in for good measure. When wild meat is not available, he substitutes a pair of guinea hens and a large piece of good beef – enough in all for about eight hungry guests.
After being cut into smallish pieces, the mixed meats are put into a large iron boiler half filled with water. Season it and let it boil till it tastes done. Now add as many diced potatoes as you wish, a half dozen chopped onions, half a head of cabbage, a double handful of dried chili beans, two cans of tomatoes, two cans of corn and a half dozen carrots. From now on it’s up to you. While the pot summers, you must hang lovingly over it, sipping, adding a bit of pepper, tabasco, Worcestershire and anything else that may seem interesting. When it tastes right, it’s done.
The most loved party dish of the lower South, the pilau, has seldom if ever been graced by a written recipe – a correct one in English. The French who early came to the Gulf were more careful with their culinary records. They, with a little Indian and African help, evolved the dish and named it after a Turkish concoction that is quite different. Many Southerners ineptly term it “purl-oo,” drawling the first syllable. In its simplest form, a pilau is little more than chicken and rice cooked together. Yet so delicious is it that the love of pilaus, and pilaus alone, has elevated the purloining of chickens to a fine art in the Gulf States.
I’ve never yet seen the colored cook who could not pluck a fowl in a jiffy and turn out a creditable pilau on tap. though few but the older ones of Hannah’s generation know how to do it up properly with sage and saffron. In the markets of Mobile and New Orleans you can buy those little bunches of dried herbs known as bouquet garni, which Creole pilau makers of the higher order consider indispensable. In using one, you must remember to drop it intact into the pot. and later remove it before the rice is added. Without it, Little pinches of parsley, wage and thyme will achieve the .same result.
A pilaff de poulet, as the French call it, begins with the poulet – a plump young chicken which, after being cut for frying, is seasoned and browned lightly in butter. Now you pour a cup of bouillon over it, add a pinch of saffron and your bouquet garni, and cover the pot and let it simmer.
You will need three or four cups of rice, depending upon the number of guests. An old recipe specified a quart of “beau riz Carolines” – “fine Carolina rice” – which is boiled in well-salted water for five minutes, drained, and then added to the chicken. Covered, chicken and rice are cooked over a slow fire until the rice is done. Before serving, you are admonished to sniff it, taste it, and “assure yourself that it is well seasoned.”
When I first went North in my teens I used to wonder why most of the soups were thin. They were so thick at home. The difference was okra. Okra is African, and instinct tells a family Negress to use it copiously, which explains why many a Southern soup is in reality a gumbo. Okra makes things thick, so in time many a thickish dish was called a gumbo, whether it contained okra or not.
The South’s greatest gumbo contains no okra at all. Nor is it strictly a gumbo. This heavenly fare, and those fortunate ones who have eaten of it wobble away with their heads in the clouds. This great, dish Is gumbo file, and it has a history.
Purely American, gumbo file was the creation of the coastal Indians of what was then West Florida, and the recipe was first given by them to Mobile’s noted Madame Langlois back in 1704. In making it, you proceed much as you would with a pilau, except that you brown a chopped onion with the chicken and add, with the other spices, a bay leaf, a little cayenne and a chili pepper cut fine. Now pour in a quart of oysters, a handful of fresh shelled shrimp, chicken livers, if you have them, a can of tomatoes and anything else that may seem interesting. A cup of oyster juice helps, and you must add plenty of hot water, so it will not thicken too soon. When it begins to taste right, cover the pot and let it simmer for an hour.
It is always eaten with rice, which is cooked and served separately. The final step comes just before serving, for this grand gumbo is not gumho filé until you have added the filé, an aromatic powder made of young sassafras leaves. It was formerly prepared by the Choctaw squaws, who sold it in the old French markets of Mobile and New Orleans; today nearly every good market carries a few bottles of it. After taking the pot from the fire, stir in two tablespoons of the filé powder. The rest is magic. The gumbo thickens instantly, and it now has an aroma and a flavor that make it one of the great dishes of the world.
For this and many another favorite I give due thanks to Creole and Indian. And hallowed be the Red Burbank who, from the wild teocentli grass, conjured up corn. But my most sincere regard is for the old family Negress like Cap’n Joe’s Hannah. Having done most of the South’s cooking, it is she who has perpetuated its culinary traditions. May her tribe never cease.
1943
(Saturday Evening Post, vol. 215, issue 46, May 15)
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